WikiDashboard, a tool developed by a team of scientists at Xerox’s PARC, provides a promising instance in reconfiguring access to the English version of Wikipedia. It is graphical and provides an easier way to grasp the edit history of entries of Wikipedia.

I prefer to use the term “reconfiguring access” rather than their claim of “social transparency”, not because the OII’s director uses the term “reconfiguring access”, but because my definition of transparency is a bit stricter: Transparency must have a purpose.

I do love the ideal of transparency, but it must have some purpose when we act for this ideal. Say, the Transparency International, which I admire very much for its consistent work against corruption with its all kinds of index and tables, has made it clear its transparency is “against corruption.” The fact that Transparency International is not promoting transparency against inefficiency or other purposes shows that the empirical evaluation of transparency must have a purpose in mind.

For the above reason, I argue against Fred Stutzman’s comment on Wikidashboard and WikiScanner saying both projects are “repurposing metadata to create a trust heuristic.” I insist that the the mined metadata and the “heuristic” created do not promise any neutral value of bias-free transparency and trust. Wikidashboard and WikScanners are just preliminary tools, but both are very promising ones. Both tools can help people make meanings out of Wikipedia by reconfiguring access to the same materials. Such tools do reconfigure access but do not make meaning by the tools themselves (I will come back to this by concrete examples in my future blog entries).

Fred Stutzman does, however, point out a few great suggestions about future use of Wikidashboard. Yes, he manages to make meanings out of what could the accessible metadata and these tools can offer for Wikipedia by some algorithms for the purpose of “the quality of the edits a user contributes.”

It is also interesting to know that some German users of Wikipedia are requesting to apply Wikidashboard on German version of Wikipedia. I did make similar request for Chinese version of Wikipedia as well. My intuition (or bias) is perhaps the German version is used and edited across the countries including Germany, Austria and Switzerland, just as the Chinese version to Chinese users in Malaysia, Singapore, Mainland China (simplified Chinese), Taiwan, and Hong Kong (traditional Chinese). The demand for transparency might be greater when users are more diverse.